Precipitation Classification at Southern Brazil in Terms of Raindrop Size Distribution Parameters During Chuva-Sul

Dados obtidos através da distribuição do tamanho de gotas de chuva (DSD) por um disdrômetro Joss-Waldvogel (JW) instalado em Santa Maria (Brasil), foram utilizados para classificar a intensidade de precipitação em seis classes (Tokay e Short, 1996). A análise permitiu caracterizar a microfísica da precipitação que ocorreu no sul do Brasil durante a campanha CHUVA-Sul

A Rare Case of Salmonella Spp. Osteomyelitis in a Dog

Osteomyelitis is an inflammatory condition of bone usually caused by infectious agents such as bacteria, fungi or viruses. The disease is characterized by systemic illness, pain and soft tissue swelling with visible radiographic alterations in bone. The most common bacteria isolated in cases of osteomyelitis in dogs and cats are Staphylococcus spp. (60% of cases), followed by Escherichia coli and Streptococcus spp. [1,2]. To our knowledge, this is the first canine case of Salmonella spp. osteomyelitis

The Idealist View of Consciousness After Death

To make educated guesses about what happens to consciousness upon bodily death, one has to have some understanding of the relationship between body and consciousness during life. This relationship, of course, reflects an ontology. In this brief essay, the tenability of both the physicalist and dualist ontologies will be assessed in view of recent experimental results in physics. The alternative ontology of idealism will then be discussed, which not only can be reconciled with the available empirical evidence, but also overcomes the lack of parsimony and limited explanatory power of physicalism and dualism. Idealism elegantly explains the basic facts of reality, such as (a) the fact that brain activity correlates with experience, (b) the fact that we all seem to share the same world, and (c) the fact that we can’t change the laws of nature at will. If idealism is correct, the implication is that, instead of disappearing, conscious inner life expands upon bodily death, a prediction that finds circumstantial but significant confirmation in reports of near-death experiences and psychedelic trances, both of which can be construed as glimpses into the early stages of the death process

Profile-Based Routing: A New Framework for MPLS Traffic Engineering

We present a new algorithm and framework for dynamic routing of bandwidth guaranteed flows. The problem is motivated by the need to dynamically set up bandwidth guaranteed paths in carrier and ISP networks. Traditional routing algorithms such as minimum hop routing or widest path routing do not take advantage of any knowledge about the traffic distribution or ingress-egress pairs, and therefore can often lead to severe network underutilization. Our work is inspired by the recently proposed minimum interference routing algorithm (MIRA) of Kodialam and Lakshman, but it improves on their approach in several ways. Our main idea is to use a traffic profile of the network, obtained by measurements or service level agreements (SLAs), as a rough predictor of the future traffic distribution. We use this profile to solve a multicommodity network flow problem, whose output is used both to guide our online path selection algorithm as well as impose admission control. The offline multicommodity solution seems very effective at distributing the routes and avoiding bottlenecks around hot spots. In particular, our algorithm can anticipate a flow\u27s blocking effect on groups of ingress-egress pairs, while MIRA only considers one ingress-egress pair at a time. Our simulation results show that the new algorithm outperforms shortest path, widest path, and minimum interference routing algorithms on several metrics, including the fraction of requests routed and the fraction of requested bandwidth routed. Finally, the framework is quite general and can be extended in numerous ways to accommodate a variety of traffic management priorities in the network

The Language of E-mail in Higher Education in Jordan: A Case Study

This paper aims to investigate the general patterns, and nonstandard linguistic features of e-mail discourse in higher education in Jordan. Specifically, it attempts to examine how such discursive practices are influenced by sender–receiver relationships. Particularly, the similarities and differences in the discursive practices between academic professionals and students in e-mail communication have been highlighted. Findings of the present study suggest that academic e-mails very much resemble traditional formal letters and memos. As members of the academic circle, both professors and students are expected to engage in discourse professionally. At the same time, the linguistic features of the e-mail messages examined are not only conditioned by the academic setting but also by the specific roles of the sender-receiver. While messages sent to and received by professors are much more uniform in the areas investigated, those sent from student to student exhibit more variation. In particular, nonstandard language including emoticons, unconventional spellings, and reduced capitalization is more commonly found. The occurrence of such features, however, is small in number

On the Plausibility of Idealism: Refuting Criticisms

Several alternatives vie today for recognition as the most plausible ontology, from physicalism to panpsychism. By and large, these ontologies entail that physical structures circumscribe consciousness by bearing phenomenal properties within their physical boundaries. The ontology of idealism, on the other hand, entails that all physical structures are circumscribed by consciousness in that they exist solely as phenomenality in the first place. Unlike the other alternatives, however, idealism is often considered implausible today, particularly by analytic philosophers. A reason for this is the strong intuition that an objective world transcending phenomenality is a self-evident fact. Other arguments—such as the dependency of phenomenal experience on brain function, the evidence for the existence of the universe before the origin of conscious life, etc.—are also often cited. In this essay, I will argue that these objections against the plausibility of idealism are false. As such, this essay seeks to show that idealism is an entirely plausible ontology

Routing Table Compression Using Binary Tree Collapse

This paper describes an algorithm which can roughly halve the size of the current Internet routing tables. This algorithm is based on the radix trie representation of routing tables, which was firstly used in the BSD Unix distributions. The binary tree representation, which is a simplified case of radix tree, does well at showing the relationships among all routing table entries and provides us a way to build a collapse algorithm based on its internal structure. The binary tree collapse algorithm consists of three techniques, with the first two quite intuitive while the third is a bit more elaborate. All techniques used in this algorithm are discussed and their effects on reducing the size of the routing table are listed and compared